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The Japanese American Children
The white bosses oversee the plantations and farms that employ the Japanese husbands and, later, their wives. With generalized perceptions of their foreign workers as docile, overly proud, or unreliable drunkards, the white bosses view their workers simply as laborers rather than as fellow human beings. The white bosses also especially leverage their power against their female employees, often in sexual ways.
The White Bosses Quotes in The Buddha in the Attic
The The Buddha in the Attic quotes below are all either spoken by The White Bosses or refer to The White Bosses. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3 Quotes
The first word of their language we were taught was water […] ‘Learn this word,’ [our husbands] said, ‘and save your life.’ Most of us did, but one of us—Yoshiko, who had […] never seen a weed in her life—did not. She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and she never woke up.
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Expect the worst, but do not be surprised by moments of kindness. There is goodness all around. Remember to make them feel comfortable. Be humble. Be polite. Appear eager to please. Say ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ and do as you’re told. Better yet, say nothing at all. You now belong to the invisible world.
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They admired us for our strong backs and nimble hands. Our stamina. Our discipline. Our docile dispositions. Our unusual ability to tolerate the heat, which on summer days in the melon fields of Brawley could reach 120 degrees. They said that our short stature made us ideally suited for work that required stooping low to the ground. Wherever they put us they were pleased.
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The White Bosses Character Timeline in The Buddha in the Attic
The timeline below shows where the character The White Bosses appears in The Buddha in the Attic. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
...after working in the fields. Although the young women have many questions about their white bosses, their husbands warn them to stay away, be cautious and very polite to avoid trouble....
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Many of the young women work hard to impress their bosses, sometimes because they want to prove that they can be as skilled as their husbands,...
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...their new lives and how their husbands’ photographs and letters were false. Sometimes, male figures—their bosses, white American men, or even their husbands’ Japanese friends—offer the young women money or gifts...
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...move to the suburbs, where the women work as maids and caretakers. Like their white bosses in the fields, the white women who hire the Japanese women find them more hardworking...
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The white men of the households that the Japanese women work for sometimes lead them to the bedroom,...
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